What’s an ideal team?

For a very long time I have been thinking as to what is a right team for a startup?

In almost all the talks on entrepreneurship and startup’s you are definite to hear people talking about success stories of startups and relate it to one of the three things,

Great Idea

Right team

Right timing

Yup, these three ingredient are considered to be very important to build a company that lasts for long and you can always look for these ingredients in your dream company. But I haven’t found any literature which could provide a scientific reason on proportion and weight-age for each of these three ingredient for a perfect recipe.

As startups we always try to accelerate the process of failure!

It may sound ridiculous, but yes in lean startup techniques we learn how to fail, how to fail quickly and how to accelerate the process of failure. We don’t want to wait till the product is launched and then know whether customer wants to buy the product or not, instead we develop product by taking the feedback from customer. This process helps in many ways, first it helps us to validate our hypothesis about the problem that we are solving and second we get to know whether the solution we are providing is the right solution.

There is a list of 20 reasons why startups fail and I am sharing the list here, the 3rd in the list is “Not the right team“, about which I want to share my learning today.

I am talking about the 3rd most important reason for startup’s failure, “What’s a dream team?”.

According to Steve Blank ( author of ‘The Startup Owner’s Manual’ ), the right team is made of a Hacker, Designer and Hustler.

Hacker (geek) is a technology guy, he likes to build technology, he is a developer, he is a passionate engineer, he creates algorithm, he creates intellectual property and the hacker eats, sleeps and breathes code.

Designer (hipster) is an artist, he is an architect, he builds the brand, he makes sure that the user interface and user experience is simple and lovable, and the designer eats, sleeps and breathes design.

Hustler (visionary) is a business savvy guy, he is a good sales man, he builds the team, ignites the passion, builds the culture, makes investor pitches and tough decision under extreme uncertainty that startups work and the hustler eats, sleeps and breathes the business model.

Generally, if a startup is founded by less than three people then one of the founder has to wear the multiple hats to balance the team.

In GeekSynergy, we aren’t aligning ourselves to these roles, but we are doing what we love to do, Gowrav likes to build things and is passionate about technology, Anil is an artist and is passionate about designing and I like to build teams and company that impact life of people, I am passionate about business.